The guy on the left who's doffing his... crown? At the Pope?[Charlemagne and Pope Adrian I][Painted By Antoine Vérard c. 1493, Source: Wikimedia Commons]

I know I’ve mentioned Charlemagne before. Holy Roman Emperor, crowned Christmas 800, unified much of northern Europe under his rule. So yeah, he was a pretty important guy. Did you know he was also partially responsible for a reinvention of lowercase letters in what we now call the Roman alphabet?

See, he found as he added to his empire that clear communication was key to maintaining his control. The thing was, since the fragmentation of the Roman Empire 400 years prior and the migration of new groups of people with new languages into Europe, people on one side of his territories probably didn’t speak the quite the same versions of Latin and they certainly didn’t all write things the same way. Some of the manuscripts produced were really hard to read simply because it was difficult to make out the letters.

I can make out "ego hoc" and that's about it.[Merovingian script from an 8th century Evangelary, Source: Wikimedia Commons]

So Charlemagne decided to replace the previous script with a clearer one. He did not do the work himself, being only semi-literate and already very busy carving out and running an empire. Instead he gave the task to Alcuin of York and those who worked under him at the scriptorium at Aachen. The script he produced is now known as Carolingian minuscule.

The top half of that image contains a majuscule, or uppercase, script. The lower half is all Carolingian minuscule. It was easier to write quickly than a majuscule and easier to read than the Merovingian script. The script spread across Europe and was popular for a long time before being superseded by Gothic scripts. It was revived by the humanists in the Renaissance (they mistook it for a Classical Roman script rather than a medieval one) and spread from their works into typeface with the invention of the printing press. The modern font Times New Roman is partially based on this script.